TORTURE

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23203, 14 December 1940, Page 14

TORTURE

The History of Torture Throughout the Ages. By George Ryley Scott. T. Werner Laurie Ltd. 328 pp. (15/- net.) The most horrifying of the horrifying facts in this book is that the story it tells needs to be brought up to date* confronting us with the new barbarism an<j its methods. Curiously enough, Mr Scott has little or nothipg ; to say about the : atrocities of the Nazi ’ concentration camps; but in a review of torture in nineteenth and twentieth century .Russia and in modern China, of terrorist technique in Ireland, and of ■the third degree and lynchings in the United States, for example, he says enough to prove a dreadful ■case.’ “Torture,” said the Very Rev. W. R. Inge last year, “has been reintroduced into Europe.” He might more, truly have said that it had never been stamped out but only driven out of immediate view. Mr Scott writes some short and general chapters on the psychology of torture. Then he runs through its history, from Greece and Rome to the witch hunts and the days of judicial and religious torture, the torture of slaves, and specifically Oriental practices. The third part of the book is an elaborate account of the torturer’s technique—from boiling and frying, the torture of the rack, the wheel, and the boot, to decapitation, flaying, hanging alive, and so on. The fourth, and perhaps superfluous, part is a statement of the case against torture. Mr Scott’s pages are illustrated with numerous plates; but even more impressive illustrations of what torture has meant and means are his still more numerous quotaiious from contemporary records.